Data Analytics Services & Solutions

There are many ways that acquiring and analyzing data can benefit your business. As your organization grows, so will the amount of data you gather, and that will lead to learning new ways to apply that information positively for your business. There are, however, some standard services you can expect to receive via data analytics. Below you will find information on various types of data analytics services along with the solutions and insights they could provide to your business:

• Financial Analytics - Tracking expenses and other monetary assets will reveal patterns in spending that can save you both time and money when appropriately addressed.
• Marketing and Sales Data - By studying your specific industry's market, you can gain insight into client trends and other relevant sales information. You can also uncover insights into customer behavior and forge deeper relationships with those customers.
• Supply Chain Analytics - Through data analytics, you can optimize your supply chain like never before. Production and distribution can use data to quickly scale with a fluctuating market.
• Operational Analytics - Harnessing data throughout the manufacturing process can help you save time and cut costs through measures such as preventative maintenance of equipment.

When it comes to utilizing data, the quality of said information is paramount. Data will always be generated through operations, but how you gather that data can make a tremendous difference in how useful that information will be.

Data modernization is a service offered by third-party organizations that can provide some of the highest quality analytics. Modernization allows your business to scale data as needed and incorporate many different data sources. This practice involves using automation and new technology combined with proper management wherever possible to make a positive difference in your data analytics capabilities.

Cleanly gathering data from multiple sources also allows for creating a centralized depository such as a data warehouse. Through proper scaling, you can then easily handle rapid growth and even larger sets of data. Ultimately you want to process as much data as you can in a meaningful way. The more information you can access, the more areas in your organization can benefit. It is important that all sources for your data warehouse can be integrated into a single source of truth that allows all departments across your organization to easily access and visualize the data they need while ensuring that data is consistent.

Big data is a term you will often hear when exploring data analytics solutions. This term refers to any large data set that must be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns or associations in human behavior and interactions. Big data plays a massive role in data analytics because it allows you to access and process information sets that are too extensive to be useful via traditional data processing methods. AI and computational resources can allow for the processing of big data and the extrapolation of information that was previously thought impossible. One of the main ways that data analytics can benefit your organization is through big data processing.

Analytics provide insight into every aspect of your business. Everything from order processing to customer interactions can be improved through the proper utilization of data. One of the greatest benefits of data analytics is the ability to learn new ways to use information such as patterns and client trends. Data-driven decision making is the key difference between successfully using analytics and uselessly gathering data. 

Every day, your organization is generating more and more data. Filtering through all of your generated information can be a daunting task. There is often unneeded data created as well that can cause distractions and prevent real solutions from being devised using data analytics. IT operational analytics can help solve this problem by identifying specific use cases for your data and helping you create a more efficient workflow for your entire business. Like with all aspects of data analytics, you must think of every area of your organization that can benefit from proper IT operational analytics.

When storing any amount of data, there is always a concern regarding the security of that data. Returning customers may find the storage of their information helpful and easy to use, but the safety of that data is then the responsibility of your business. It is not unusual to be hesitant when giving access to your data to a third party for data analytics.

While privacy concerns are warranted, there are many IT security solutions in place in both the public and private cloud that work to keep your data secure while allowing you to still get the most use out of it. Yes, storing and handling all your data internally is the safest way to process information but that solution also severely limits what you can do with that data. Having a third-party handle data analytics allows you to get the most out of your data while still keeping customer information secure.

There are numerous security protocols layered across both organizations that create a safe environment for the processing and handling of data. You can think of it this way: Storing information in one location makes that data as secure as that single place. Storing data across multiple organizations, each with different security protocols, creates more layers of protection, requiring more resources to hack into. This practice of stacking security protocols helps make the data stored within incredibly secure.

Insights are data that your business can utilize to increase profits, client retention, and many other areas. While data-based decision-making will benefit your organization as a whole, insights can often have more concrete results. Numerous insights can be applied to your business, but some of the more common types of insights available through data analytics include:

• Better Customer Understanding - Learning customer trends allow you to better understand how your clients interact with your service or product. This understanding can lead to new discoveries and innovations when it comes to customer interactions.
• Faster Response Times - Whether you are selling a product or a service, the time it takes your employees to communicate with clients is crucial. By studying trends of past interactions, you can use data to speed up communication response times and ultimately do more business.
• Overall Efficiency - As mentioned earlier, data analytics can be applied to every facet of your operation. This means that everything from interdepartmental communication to manufacturing can be made more efficient by studying available data.
• Aided Decision Making - Some decisions regarding your business can be more challenging than others, but those tough choices can become easier with proper data utilization. Data analytics allow you to better estimate the effects of decisions before fully implementing solutions.

One of the key benefits of properly utilizing data analytics is the ability to implement automation. Data analytics can offer insights such as how much of a product needs to be manufactured at one time and, in turn, can help create an automation that can scale up and down intuitively with product demand.

Another way data analytics can help aid automation is through maintenance. By studying the correct data, you can see what types of errors are most common in your infrastructure, given a wide range of factors. Automation can then watch for these factors and apply preventative maintenance as needed, saving you valuable troubleshooting or hardware downtime. Just like with DevOps, the more automation you implement within your analytics, the more efficient your organization becomes.

Automation and efficient and organized storage of your data is a prerequisite for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Building and training machine learning models on your enterprise data allows you to instantly analyze huge amounts of data and predict and proactively respond to emerging customer behavior and demands. Harnessing data en masse also allows you to create and train AI. 

The right AI solution can reduce labor and turnover costs and improve functions such as customer support satisfaction and consistency. AI and ML built through minimum viable model (MVM) creation can show the efficiency gains and operational enhancements you can take to market with the data you have available.

Data analytics is all about impact. Your business generates massive amounts of data through daily operations, and without the proper monitoring and processing, all of that information can go to waste.

• Data modernization will allow your business to use AI and new technology to gather information from everywhere possible.
• Data storage. The proper storage of your data in a repository or data warehouse further improves data analytics.
• Insights can take the benefits of data analytics even further by providing concrete areas of growth and metrics to boost revenue within your business.
• Third-party data analytics service providers can help you avoid costly setbacks or data breaches. Data analyst specialists have specialized tools and extensive experience they can utilize to get your organization processing data as fast as possible. 

No matter your reason for looking into data analytics, proper implementation is essential. While you may be able to set up some light analytics internally, any business not specializing in data will struggle to compete on a larger scale. This is where experts like those at CDW come in. Our CDW Amplified™ Data experts can supply your business with access to information and analytics tools not available before. CDW works with major partners like AWS, Microsoft, Splunk, Tableau, Google, IBM and more to help with data modernization, ensuring your business has the best data analytics solutions possible, including building ML/AI models. Get in touch to discuss your needs today.